Shot Through Velvet Read Free

heavy machinery, the blue corpse came up with it.
    In the ensuing confusion and gasps of disbelief, Lacey felt Vic’s hand on her shoulder. His face was stern and his jaw was set. She’d seen that look before. She whispered, “I do not have a murder mojo.”
    Donovan snorted. “I didn’t say that. Today.”
    “You’re the one who gave me the tip the factory was closing.”
    “I should have my head examined.”
    “It’s a good story, Vic. Factory closing, workers out of jobs, American industries killed by cheap foreign imports.”
    He nodded toward the body. “But it’s a better story now, right? With Blue Boy hanging there?”
    “It’s a more complicated story now.” Lacey was beginning to regret not bringing a photographer, but she didn’t mention that to Vic. He had his own problems. She would have to make do with her small digital camera. She took a few quick photos, but she put it away after being glared at by Vic.
    Lacey whispered as they moved a few yards away. “Vic, you know that old song, ‘Blue Velvet’? It keeps running through my brain. And I still can see blue velvet— ”
    “ —through my screams . Thanks, darling. Now it’s running through my brain.”
    Tom Nicholson stood next to the spool, shaking his head and staring.
    “Do you know who it is?” Vic asked.
    “Well—” Nicholson began. “It’s a little hard to say.”
    A latecomer to the party joined the tour. Kira Evans, the bookkeeper, screamed and clapped her hand over her mouth. She looked ashen. A nearby worker reached out to prop her up.
    Another woman gasped, “Oh my God. Is he dead?”
    “Is he dead?!” A workman named Dirk Sykes answered. “Inez, honey, he is dead blue.”
    Sykes looked fierce, even in his bright turquoise Hawaiian shirt, which revealed a scorpion tattoo crawling up his right forearm. He wore his black hair pulled back in a ponytail, but with a finely clipped Julius Caesar fringe around the nape of his neck. He was definitely dancing to the beat of a different fashion drummer. Lacey had just learned his now-defunct job was shearing the fabric. The velvet was woven with the soft nap connecting two heavier sheets of backing material. Sykes had been the one who sheared the woven material in half, producing two sheets of velvet with the nap exposed. Scars on Sykes’s hands and face testified to the sharpness of the huge blades he used.
    “Why, Mr. Blue looks like one of them troll dolls, only not as cute,” Inez Garcia said, after catching her breath.
    A pretty Hispanic woman about thirty-five, Inez barely topped five feet, but she fearlessly stepped right up to get a better look at the dead man. She held on to her long, black braid to protect it from the dye.
    Like most of the other workers, Inez was dressed as if for summer: shorts and a thin cotton top. The shearing machines, the washers, dyers, and dryers pumped out heat and made the factory almost tropical inside, in sharp contrast to the bleak Virginia winter outside. It must have been almost ninety degrees in the dye house.
    “That looks like a goat-sucking chupacabra to me,” Sykes said.
    “That’s no chupacabra . It’s a coyote with mange,” Inez responded. “Blue mange.”
    “I always wondered what’d happen if you fell in the dye vat,” observed Hank Richards, the maintenance chief. “Now we know. I guess he’s been in there a while.”
    Richards appeared to be in his late forties, tall and fit with a soldier’s bearing but an aging surfer dude’s shaggy blond hair, mustache, and goatee. He wore a navy short-sleeve polo shirt with dark blue slacks, which were neat and tidy. He had sad brown eyes that watched everything, and he had reached out to Kira Evans when she screamed.
    Everyone fell silent for a moment. They seemed to know who the dead man was, but no one was quite ready to say so. Perhaps because he was so changed from life? The velvet factory workers had never seen anything like the blue body before, and they were